


The Habit of a Foreign Sky

by Etalice



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: (as always), (year two), AU: the final battle happens in the 2010s, Angst with a Happy Ending, Everyone Has Issues, Excellent use of my duolingo-learned Swedish, Finding a home, Getting Back Together, I wrote this to make my friend cry, M/M, Magical home renovation specialist Draco, Magical sanatorium owner Harry, Or being home, Pining, Point is: here be symbolic nonsense, Several ghost OCs, Sweden - Freeform, Switzerland, poetic prose, sad boys in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-22
Updated: 2020-11-22
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:34:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27654179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Etalice/pseuds/Etalice
Summary: “I bought a house,” Harry says. It is an early April morning and he’s standing at the gates of Malfoy Manor, drizzle sticking his hair to his forehead and dripping down his neck.He’s lying.Harry hasn’t bought a house. He’s bought an abandoned sanatorium at the foot of a Swiss mountain. An abandoned sanatorium that’s both magical in nature and steadfastly refusing to bond with Harry.When Harry buys an abandoned sanatorium on impulse, he can think of only one person capable of helping him with the bonding ritual: his ex, Draco Malfoy, who he hasn't seen in five years.
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter
Comments: 8
Kudos: 70





	The Habit of a Foreign Sky

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Andithiel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Andithiel/gifts).



> Andithiel, my darling, I can't believe it's already been a year since I first wrote a fic to make you cry. I am grateful for the privilege of calling you my friend and of being the recipient of an abundance of pictures and videos of the sea (of being allowed to send you all my pictures of the mountains too.) As you will see, I found inspiration for this fic in the places we've been and loved enough to share this year. I hope that this will make you cry at least a little and that you know I love you very much, always, from the bottom of my heart. Happy birthday.
> 
> I would like to thank the wonderful [Orpheus87](https://archiveofourown.org/users/orpheous87/works) for wrangling all my prepositions and managing the infestation of wild -s that this fic originally suffered from. If what you read makes any grammatical sense, it is entirely thanks to her, and all remaining mistakes are my own.
> 
> If the Swedish in this fic doesn't sound like garbled rubbish, it is certainly no thanks to duolingo (which insisted on not teaching me more than one useful sentence) but it is entirely the work of [Sassy3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sassy3/pseuds/Sassy3) who patiently answered all my questions about churchbells and grammar, and enlisted the help of several people in her real life to make the translations flow better.
> 
> And finally, I would like to thank [MarchnoGirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MarchnoGirl/works) for her wonderful mental support while I was writing this fic and for devising the most wonderful plots to help me find beta readers before Orpheus agreed to take on the task.
> 
> Before you read, know that I have decided to keep all dialogue in its original language in this fic. You shouldn't need to understand exactly what is being said to understand the plot, but if you're curious, I'll leave a translation in the end notes. I should also mention I've taken some liberties with the time frame for the final battle. In this universe, it happens in the early 2010s rather than in the late 1990s, so that the fic can take place in the present day.

_Away from Home are some and I —_ _  
_ _An Emigrant to be_ _  
_ _In a Metropolis of Homes_ _  
_ _Is easy, possibly --_

_The Habit of a Foreign Sky_ _  
_ _We -- difficult -- acquire_ _  
_ _As Children, who remain in Face_ _  
_ _The more their Feet retire._

_\- Emily Dickinson_

* * *

“I bought a house,” Harry says. It is an early April morning and he’s standing at the gates of Malfoy Manor, drizzle sticking his hair to his forehead and dripping down his neck.

He’s lying.

Harry hasn’t bought a house. He’s bought an abandoned sanatorium at the foot of a Swiss mountain. An abandoned sanatorium that’s both magical in nature and steadfastly refusing to bond with Harry.

* * *

It’s not that Harry ever meant to buy a sanatorium. Some days, Harry thinks he meant to do very little of what he actually did in his life. On those days, he hits the pub or moves to a different country or lies down in the woods and cries his eyes out. He avoids thinking about it too much, his life. The direction it’s going in too.

It’s not that Harry ever meant to buy a sanatorium, and it’s not that he ever meant to find himself here in the first place, but he’s been grabbing the first Portkey to anywhere for years, now. He’s been trying to leave England behind like adults leave their childhood, locked in a toy chest in the bedroom that used to be your own but is only ever a guest room or a memory now.

Really, it’s not that Harry ever meant to buy a sanatorium, but the mountains were breathtaking in the cool February air, dressed in white like brides or shroud-wrapped bodies, glittering in the late-afternoon sun, tall and silent and austere. And when Harry saw this house, sitting on a hill, nestled against the steep slopes how could he not fall in love? It was a thing of beauty, all sharp art deco lines and large glass conservatories, an impossible shipwreck in the middle of an alpine valley. On the beige facade, red letters read: “Le Rosaire.” _The Rosary_. The words rang hallowed and solemn like footsteps in a church.

Harry offered to buy it the very next day.

“C’est pas qu’on voudrait pas le vendre,” a man in green wellies told Harry, leaning against his tractor, “mais il va falloir des garanties, vous comprenez? C’est une partie de l’histoire du coin, notre Paquebot. Faudrait pas qu’il soit dénaturé, voyez?”

_It’s a beautiful house and I would like nothing more than to care for it in every way I can. I love it already, you know. I may not have been born here, but I love it, all the same,_ Harry wants to say. And: _I have money, more than I will ever need. I’ll take care of it for you. It could be a gem, once again, gleaming in the sunlight and softly lit at night._

“Je beaucoup argent. Faire attention. Très aimer,” Harry’s disastrous translation spells said.

The man shot him a doubtful look. He took his mobile phone out of his pocket and pointed at it.

“My daughter,” he said, “She can English. She translates me.”

The daughter, it turned out, studied biology at the local university and spoke almost flawless English. Everything was easier after that: the building had once been a _preventorium_ where women had come to stay in hopes of curing lung conditions under the watchful eyes of nuns. It was turned into a summer camp after that, which in turn had closed ten years ago; the building had been sitting empty ever since. It broke everyone’s heart, seeing it in that state. It had once been the pride of the entire valley, the most modern sanatorium in the whole country. T _he boat_ , the locals called it. There was something tragic to its slow decay. Then, a group of vandals held a rave party within its walls and did quite a lot of damage. The city had been actively looking for someone to buy it ever since.

Harry didn’t have a plan for the refurbishment, but he had money and an obsessive sort of fascination for the large, empty sanatorium. Eventually, the historical building committee decided it was enough, and less than a month later, he was handed the keys to his new home.

It was beautiful, inside, all solid oak floors and high ceilings and large windows that let light flood in. Harry walked slowly through all the rooms, his footsteps the only sound in the rich silence of the place. In one of the rooms, there were several ancient pianos; in another, the original art deco lamp still hung from the ceiling, all gleaming chrome and frosted glass. In the small chapel at the back of the building, the stained glass windows bathed him in vibrant hues of blue and red and gold, and he lay down on the flagstone floor with tears in his eyes and something fragile and precious like crystal inside his throat (tears or words or the feeling of coming home).

“I’ll save you,” he whispered to the star-high vaults of the ceilings. “I’ll love you with everything I have and you’ll never be empty again.”

* * *

The house refused to be loved.

There was much to do, age had run her grey fingers down every wall and over every floor. There was damage from the ravers too: broken windows and empty bottles forgotten in every hidden corner. Graffiti that read “Styx was here” scrawled in royal blue letters across a wall in the stairwell. It was broken and stained, that house, but the bones of her were beautiful. It was worth being saved, Harry decided. ( _And perhaps,_ Harry almost let himself think, _there is something beautiful somewhere inside me too, underneath all the grief-dust and the anger-cracks in my heart. Perhaps I am worth being saved too._ )

Harry decided to start with a fresh coat of paint in the downstairs rooms. He bought white paint and stashed it in the piano room overnight. But by the time Harry stood there in the light of morning, dressed in an old pair of jeans and his hair gathered into a messy bun, the paint had vanished entirely.

Someone must have come in through the broken window in the west conservatory, Harry thought. (In the back of his mind, there was something clawed and dark scratching at his consciousness like a cat at a door.)

Harry bought more paint. He did not leave it in the house overnight. ( _Just a precaution,_ he told himself.) Instead, in the gold-pink light of late afternoon, he took off his shoes and spread the paint in thick layers on the wall, white as the snow outside and just as glistening too. It was dark, by the time he was done, and every bone in his body hurt but as he sat on the floor paint-speckled and work-satisfied, every room was brighter than it had been at the beginning of the day.

_I’ll take you and I’ll make you whole again. I’ll paint beauty upon you until you glow with it. I’ll fix every broken window, I’ll shine all the elaborate chrome fixtures and maybe, just maybe, I’ll figure out a way of fixing myself too, in the process._

The next day, the paint sat on the floor in clean stripes, like an invisible hand had pulled it off the walls. _Just paint incompatibility,_ Harry told himself. (At the back of his mind, the clawing creature grew teeth.)

Harry bought a different kind of paint, then. Bought a primer, too. Painted the walls again, and again, and again, and every single time, the paint slid straight off the walls until Harry was at his wit’s end.

_It’s a wizarding house,_ he realised at some point between the twelfth and fifteenth coats. And: _Draco would know what to do._ He immediately decided that he wouldn’t ever ask Draco for help with the house.

In this too, he was lying.

* * *

“What do you mean, you bought a house?” Draco asks, his eyes like sea glass (unknowable and smooth. Unbearably gorgeous too.)

“It’s magical, Draco, and well... You helped with Grimmauld. It’s your job, isn’t it? Fixing magical houses. It’s what you do. It’s a purely professional request, I assure you. How much do you want for the job? I’ll pay you.”

The rain is dripping into Harry’s eyes, and his hands are slippery and cold and he runs them over his neck. He is frozen to the bone, and he pretends it’s the weather that’s sending chills running over his skin. (Not Draco. Not Draco.)

“We broke up, Harry,” Draco says slowly, the words cold, like dead fish in his mouth. “You left. Years ago. I haven’t seen you since.”

“And it’s not like that—I mean, yes. I know. We broke up. But you’re still the only person that might be able to help. I tried the bonding ritual, you know? It didn’t work. The house rejected me. No one had any idea of what went wrong. I’m not trying to get you back or anything weird, I swear. I just really need you to help me figure out what’s wrong.”

Inside Harry’s chest, everything is fragile and crumbling like chalk or old clay with every word. Harry ignores it. It’s just that he needs to fix that house. (It’s not Draco. It’s not. Not anymore.)

“Under no circumstances.” (In Draco’s mouth, Harry muses, every word is a knife. Gleaming and precise and capable of cutting gashes through his flesh.) “You’re welcome to come in and use the Floo like you’ve heard of civilisation, though. You look a fright and you’re drenched to the bone.”

Harry does not want to step inside Malfoy Manor. He does not want to use Draco’s Floo. (Does not want to remember what Draco’s face looked like in the soft flicker candlelight, does not want to remember the scent of Draco’s skin and how soft it felt under his fingers.)

He steps inside anyway.

“Please, Draco,” he tries again as he’s led through the ancient corridors. “I know it’s a bad time, I know it was always going to be a bad time, but I’m really just asking you to take a look at this house. Just this. Fix it for me, and you’ll never have to see my face again. Please, Draco. Please.”

Draco doesn’t say anything, but he stops and turns around. When Harry feels the soft, familiar magic of a gentle drying charm wash over his skin, he resists the urge to close his eyes, even though it feels like cashmere and Earl Grey tea (like lilacs in a vase in front of an open window.)

“It’s a beautiful house,” Harry says, the softness of Draco’s magic still clinging to his skin like the scent of soap. “I promise. It’s incredible, and it’s broken, and it deserves to be saved, Draco. It deserved to be saved so much. Please, help me save it. Won’t you help me for old time’s sake if nothing else?”

Draco’s face is unreadable and still like a granite cliff (but Harry is the waves, is the sea—there is desire enough inside him to wear the stone down.) When Draco finally speaks, his words are hard and sharp, with no softness around the edges:

“Fine. Just this once. For old time’s sake. And never again.”

Harry doesn’t know if his heart soars or sinks at the words.

* * *

“This is not a house.”

It is the first thing Draco says when Harry shows him the hilltop building. And he’s right, of course, he’s right, but Harry can’t bring himself to care because Draco’s there beside him, surrounded by the austere mountain slopes and the crisp air of April. Harry can’t stop watching him. They walk towards the house in silence, mismatched companions (One slow, the other quick. One dark, the other light. One a wound, the other a knife.)

“Harry, you said you bought a house,” Draco repeats as Harry turns the key in the lock of one of the French doors. “Why on earth did you acquire this giant mess of a thing?”

Still, the building is every bit as beautiful as the first time Harry saw it, and Harry can see that it steals Draco’s breath away too, as he walks on the ancient oak floors and lets the sunlight kiss his face through the ancient glass of the large single-pane windows. Draco runs his deft fingers along every wall in silence, closing his eyes to better feel the magic held therein. Harry does not stop watching him.

_Those fingers ran across my skin once,_ is all he can think. And: _I kissed his eyelids then._

Inside Harry's chest, his heart is a lighthouse (on fire.) He’s alive, and he’s burning, and he finds that he can’t tell the difference between both these things. (Perhaps he never could.)

“It called to me,” he answers as Draco ponders over the results of his diagnostic spell, hanging in the air in glittering gold lines. “I saw it and I knew I had to save it, no matter how much it costs or how much work it would be, you know?”

Draco closes his eyes, a quick, tight motion that would escape Harry entirely if he hadn’t known Draco’s body as well as he knew his own once. Then, he lets out a brittle laugh that sounds like dry clay crumbling or like china breaking and not like a laugh at all.

“Of course, you did,” Draco breathes softly, pain staining the edges of his voice like ink.

“Well, you know me,” Harry answers with a small, self-deprecating laugh. “Always been one for hopeless cases, really.”

Draco’s eyes grow cold and hard.

“You’ve always been one for hopeless cases until they get too hopeless and then you run away, you mean?” he hisses, before turning around and adding in a deadly, quiet tone: “You ran away from your entire life when it got too difficult for you, then ran right back into it by impulse, buying something and letting everyone else fix all the messes it made for you. I should have known, really. It’s what you’ve always done. Still, I expected you to have changed at some point in the past five years because I am, apparently, an idiot.”

Every word is an ice-cold storm-wave, crashing over Harry’s lighthouse heart until it’s extinguished entirely (black with soot and drenched in salt, crumbling and broken: a ruin.)

_This mouth carved word-wounds into my flesh,_ he remembers. And: _That man cracked my ribs open, and pulled my heart out, and locked it, bloody and beating, in a cabinet like an antique watch or gold-rimmed bone-china plate (something precious and useless, meant to be seen but never touched.)_

“Nice to see you haven’t changed either, Draco. I almost thought you’d grown a heart when you agreed to help, but I should have known better. I should have known you wouldn’t understand what it means to love something, to want to save it or fix it. My bad.”

Every word is like a sea urchin between Harry’s teeth, their sounds scratching long bloody gashes on his tongue and inside his cheeks.

Draco’s face stays impassible.

“Don’t you dare presume that you know anything about me, Harry James Potter. Now if you don’t mind, I will require that you stop your inane chit-chat and let me focus on my diagnostic charms. Why don’t you go outside and be useless there, mmm?”

Behind Draco’s eyes, a storm is raging.

Harry slams the door behind him as he exits the room.

* * *

They kissed after the war, Draco and him. It started with an owl. This was unsurprising; there were many owls after the war (love letters and apologies and thank you, thank you, thank you.)

Harry doesn’t know why he opened the message this particular owl brought. There were many owls, tapping at every window and sitting on the roof and all over the street outside his door too. He did his best to ignore them.

This owl, however, was not on the roof or in the street or sitting on the windowsill. This owl had found its way into Harry’s bed and was nestled under Harry’s blankets, hooting softly with satisfaction. Harry should have thrown it out, but it looked warm and comfortable and Harry didn’t have the heart. So he fed it a treat and let it bury its funny little owl head in his pillows while he opened the letter attached to its leg.

It was from Draco Malfoy.

_Sorry_ , the letter said. And: _Thank you._ And: _I should have been better._

And between the lines, Harry read: _I was there too, in the deafening noise of the battleground. I know the smell of death too and the way fear etches itself on your bones. I too wish I could have saved the dead while they were still alive._

Harry answered the very same night.

In time, the owls stopped coming. It was only natural: people moved on from the war (buried it in the garden and planted hellebores to mark the grave and went back to their lives.)

But as August hung the sun high in the hot air of the sky, and as September drenched the cobbled street with rain and wind, Harry found that he couldn’t move on. Draco wrote that couldn’t either.

The small, funny owl continued carrying messages between them, penned in the middle of the night and full of every feeling that spilt out of their chests in the hours between dusk and dawn.

_I don’t know who I am,_ they said to each other. And: _I am entirely alone._ And: _God, oh god, I’ve never said this to anyone. (You’re the first, you’re the first, you’re the first.)_

They met for the first time since the last battle at Snape’s funeral. The Ministry had deemed it better for Snape not to be buried with all the other victims of the war when wounds were still fresh and grief clawed through everyone’s heart like wolves. The peace was still fragile, that spring, the opinion of the people too easily turned, and Harry boiled over with deep-set rage at the idea that the man who had sacrificed everything to win the war was hidden away like a shameful secret while those who hid at home and let children fight in their place roamed the street freely with words like “freedom” and “justice” filling their throats and dripping from their lips.

It was different, in the soft light of October. There was no rage, only a bone-deep sense of loss that filled Harry’s airways with quicksilver and his veins with lead. Then, Draco stepped in front of the casket, the mourning-black a stark contrast to the pallor of his skin, and the world grew still. 

_It’s you_.

The thought struck Harry like lightning as Draco spoke to the casket in soft, wet tones.

_It’s you._

When Draco turned around, he caught Harry’s eye and froze.

_It’s you, it’s you, it’s you. I spilt all my secrets in the cup of your hands and I gave you all my words. It’s you—oh, it’s you. You exist._

Draco walked over, shook Harry’s hand.

“Potter,” he said. The tone was cool but his eyes were burning holes into Harry’s skin.

“Malfoy,” Harry answered.

They did not stop looking at each other, not throughout the ceremony and not during the feast afterwards either. They did not talk about their letters or their late-night secrets. Instead, they talked about school, about the future. About Quidditch, too. But all the while, their eyes kept repeating like a prayer or a litany: _it’s you, it’s you, it’s you._

Then, the feast was over, and it was the early hours of the morning, and they found they weren’t ready to let go of the other quite yet.

“Walk the grounds with me?” Harry asked in the soft hum of departing guests.

Draco smiled.

They made it all the way to the edge of the forbidden forest before Draco took his hand. Everything was a blur after that. There were trembling bodies and breaths not breathed; there were hands fisted in soft jumpers and fingers carding through hair and lips—oh, there were lips on lips, and it was unbearable, that sensation. It was pleasure, bright and cutting like a knife, and Harry thought he might die from it. Minutes passed, hours perhaps. Above them, the star-speckled sky shone softly like hope. 

“It’s you,” Harry whispered into Draco’s skin when they eventually broke apart. 

“It’s you,” Draco whispered back, and in that moment, Harry could have sworn they wouldn’t ever part.

* * *

Harry walks through the bushes and the brambles that now grow wildly in what was once an immaculate park. He should not have snapped at Draco, he knows this.

He should not have looked at Draco’s face and seen the past there, is the real problem.

He’s over Draco, he has been for years. Draco stole his breath and broke his heart and left him alone to painfully puzzle all the pieces back together, but he’s grown since then. He’s mended his heart, and he’s forgiven Draco, and he was going to be okay—being in the same house as him, working under the same roof. Working. It’s just that, it’s just working. Just this once, Draco said. Just this once and never again.

Harry walks back towards the house.

Draco isn’t anywhere to be found on the ground floor. The paint strips are still sitting in sad little heaps along the walls. Harry breathes. 

_Just this once and never again_. 

He walks up the stairs.

In the upstairs conservatory, he finds Draco sitting cross-legged on the floor, a mess of glowing lines and figures around him and suddenly, _I’m sorry_ sits like a stone on his tongue (heavy and cold.) Before he can find a way to form his lips around it, Draco turns around.

“I ran almost every diagnostic spell I know,” he says, vanishing the glowing lines with his wand, “I don’t have the first idea of what’s wrong with this place.”

Harry’s heart sinks and soars all at once. 

( _Just this once and never again.)_

Behind the mountains, the sun is slowly starting to set and the last rays of it are setting fire to every wall. The sight of it is breathtaking.

Harry silently sits down next to Draco. Clouds shift and the warm light of sunset floods the room, the sharp lines of mountains cutting through the stream of light like dark knives. The sight of it paints awe all over Draco’s face, his eyes gleaming burn-gold with the warm light as he stares through the window at the scenery. _Beautiful,_ Harry thinks (and he does not ask himself whether he’s referring to the sunset or to the man watching it.)

“The view is incredible, here,” Draco whispers.

Harry doesn’t answer. Draco doesn’t stop watching the sunset, and Harry doesn’t stop watching Draco. Only when it is entirely dark, do they push themselves to their feet and walk back to their inn.

* * *

Harry would like to say it was easy, loving Draco Malfoy. He would like to believe that it was one of these love stories that inevitably end because people change and ways part, but that was beautiful and soft and full of light before it was over.

The truth is that it wasn’t.

In his letters, Draco had felt like an endless stream of promises and secrets, like the sun in the sky, like a fire in the night. Draco had felt like a kindred spirit, like the only other person in a world populated by the painted-on smiles of mannequins. Draco had understood the pain, had understood the rage, and when he kissed Harry in a moonlit forest, surrounded by trees and silence, Harry thought his heart was going to burst open with brightly coloured happiness-confetti.

And they should have been happy, then. They should have held onto each other. They should have healed and been healed and been safe. But they weren’t and they didn’t. In the real world, Draco felt like a granite cliff, immense and cold and entirely unmoving, and Harry kept running headfirst against the solid stone of him. 

_It’s just that the war carved pieces out of him_ , Harry told himself at first, _(pieces shaped like his parents, like knowing his place in the world, like the certainty there was a future waiting for him). It’s okay. I’ll love him all the same._

So Harry loved Draco. He loved Draco immensely and patiently like the sea loves the sky. He loved Draco with everything he had, with all his blood and every single one of his breaths. Still, Draco sometimes wouldn’t speak to him for days at a time. Still, Draco wouldn’t tell him he loved him, and Draco wouldn’t move in with him. “Don’t rush me,” he told Harry.

_I’ll be enough,_ Harry told himself, _I’ll love him in all the right ways and with my entire heart, and we’ll be okay, won’t we? We’ll be okay._

Harry didn’t realise how much it hurt him, at first, as he loved Draco through sleepless nights and cold shoulders. He told himself it didn’t matter if Draco never said _I love you,_ if Draco forbade Harry to say it too. The words were burning the tip of Harry’s tongue but “I’m not ready to hear it,” Draco said and Harry swallowed his love like glowing embers. He told himself it didn’t matter if Draco never committed to a relationship with Harry, didn’t want to come to Harry’s London flat either. They were fixing Grimmauld Place, and it was enough, wasn’t it, spending every daylight hour together? It was enough, it had to be. Harry would learn to still his greed-grasp heart, would learn to keep all his words inside his throat, and it would be enough.

_I’ll be good and I’ll be patient. And it’ll hurt, but I’ll be silent— oh, I’ll be so quiet you’ll never know how much it hurts. And when I’ve suffered enough, when I’ve proved myself enough, you’ll open up and you’ll love me, won’t you? You’ll love me and it’ll all be worth it._

There were days that didn’t hurt like being burned at the stake, of course, there always are. There were days when Draco let Harry be there for him, when he inevitably broke down under the unbearable weight of being alive, when he let Harry hold his hand and talk him through the tears. There were soft moments of silence as they sat on the floor in a bedroom or a bathroom and slowly cast a myriad of spells that glittered around them like fairy dust. There were rare moments when Draco melted in Harry’s arms too, where he let himself be touched and be kissed, and when Harry almost believed it didn’t matter that he always loved more than was loved because this was good, wasn’t it? This was good, and it was beautiful, and it filled Harry with light and hope.

Then, there were bad days: dark and awful and too many to count. Days when Draco didn’t want to be touched at all, and there were days when Harry thought the loneliness of not being truly loved would crush him entirely. There were days that were bad for other reasons too, because the atrocities of the war weighed like a stone on Harry’s lungs or because Harry drowned in the wine-dark sea of grieving for everyone he had ever loved. Draco never stayed, on these days. He never knew what to say or how to act. “I can’t always be there for you,” he told Harry. And: “you’re not the only one who hurt. I’m not strong enough to pull you back to your feet.” He never said he was sorry, and Harry gasped for breath in empty rooms, trying to slow the panic-scramble of his heart, trying not to drown in the dark air around him.

There were days that stuck to Harry’s skin like tar, dark and sticky and pungent. There were days that wormed their way into his heart until he thought his entire bloodstream was poisoned with the terrible feeling of never being enough (mercury ran through his veins, then, dazzling as love and deadly as loneliness.) And slowly, like sand trickling through in an hourglass, it became too much.

* * *

“I think I’ve figured out what I’m going to do about the house,” Draco tells Harry the next morning. “I’ve been thinking about Wilmine Witbooi’s work on buildings with what she calls a _collective soul_. She worked on schools and sacred sites in eastern Namibia, but I think I might be able to apply her framework to your house since it was a hospital once.

His entire face is alight with the challenge of cracking the mystery of Harry’s house, and Harry remembers the glimmer in his eyes better than he’d like.

The weather is dreadful, the rain falling in thin but cold and unrelenting sheets. Still, in a desperate effort to forget that he loved Draco once, in a desperate effort to cleanse his skin of nostalgia for a past that sticks to it like glitter, Harry decides to go and work on the garden. It’s a ridiculous idea, but Draco’s already locked himself in the piano room and so he doesn’t tell Harry as much. (He doesn’t tell Harry that he’s impulsive and ridiculous and always doing the wrong thing either, though Harry knows he would if he knew.)

Fistfuls of bramble cut Harry’s hands with their thorns as the rain peppers cold kisses down his neck and weighs his woollen sweater down. It hurts, and it is cold, and every inch of Harry’s skin sings with pain. Still, it hurts less than remembering that he loved Draco (than remembering Draco never really loved him back.)

* * *

The very first spring after the war, they asked Harry to speak at the very first war memorial. _How could I,_ Harry wanted to scream or sob (to punch every word through a wall), _when the war never stopped inside my skull. How could I when it still constricts my lungs and beats my heart like a drum and fills my chest with groundwater-grief until I drown? How could I when I can barely sleep some nights and barely function some days, when it broke me so irrevocably and so entirely?_

Instead, Harry accepted.

“You don’t owe them anything,” Draco drawled when Harry told him. There was a cold kind of fire in his eye, something that reminded Harry of ancient descriptions of hell. “It’s not like they care about everything you had to sacrifice to save them the rest of the year.”

“I have to.” Harry’s voice was flat and almost inaudible as he let himself fall onto the sofa and stared at the ceiling. “They’ve suffered too, they need someone to hold on to, to tell them it’ll be alright.”

“That’s bollocks,” Draco answered immediately in his knife-like voice (Harry only was beginning to be familiar with it then.) “You suffered more than all of them put together, and still they expect you to dance in front of them like a trained monkey. They did nothing to support you, Harry. This entire year, they did nothing but go on with their own little lives, leaving you behind to cope with all the wounds of the war. You owe them nothing.”

Harry sighed and kept staring at the ceiling.

“It’s what I have to do. You can’t understand. It’s the right thing.”

“Oh, I can’t understand,” Draco hissed. “No, I wouldn’t understand what it feels like sacrificing myself, would I? But let me tell you something, Harry—you’re never going to get better if you don’t stop putting every single person in the entire world before yourself. You’re never going to stop having nightmares, and you’re never going to stop feeling like you’re made out of guilt, and you’re never going to figure out how to be happy. And I can’t be there to hold your hand through every anxiety attack because you felt like sacrificing yourself—again—for people who couldn’t care less about you. That’s not fair on me, is it? You go play hero for a crowd, then you come back and you expect me to pick up all the pieces of you and somehow be okay with it. Well, I can’t. It’s too much for me, Harry. I can’t always be your crutch. You need to learn to stand on your own.”

The words hit Harry like a punch to the lungs. He sprang to his feet and stared at Draco. Draco’s face was a forest fire or tidal wave, and all Harry’s words left him.

He stormed out instead, slamming the door behind him. He made it all the way to his flat before panic took him apart. As he lay on the rug, with tears in his eyes and trying to remember how to breathe, he vowed never to have another anxiety attack in front of Draco.

* * *

When Harry makes his way back to the house, drenched in sweat and rain, he finds Draco still in the piano room. There is someone with him, Harry realises as he opens the French doors and the sound of animated conversation immediately wafts into the wet morning air. Harry steps inside.

Draco is sitting cross-legged on the floor again and talking to the ghost of a young woman. She’s dressed in an old-fashioned, knitted dress with ruched sleeves and a large bow at the collar, and her hair is all done-up in curls. On her face is a large, delighted smile as she talks. When she throws her head back and laughs, the sound is crystalline and joyous, and Harry thinks he’s never heard a sound quite as beautiful in a long time.

“Oh, is that him?” she asks Draco with a girlish sort of curiosity as soon as she spots Harry. Draco turns his head, then nods.

“Hello,” Harry says, feeling oddly out of place in his own house. Like he’s interrupting a reunion between two old friends.

“This is Iris,” Draco says, pushing himself to his feet. “She’s—well, a ghost. You’ve gathered that much, I imagine? Iris, this is Harry. He bought this whole building for reasons entirely beyond my comprehension.”

Iris does a small, stilted curtsy. She doesn’t speak.

“It’s nice to meet you,” Harry says after a while. “I mean, it’s not nice in the sense that I wouldn’t be meeting you like this if you hadn’t—you know—died, and I’m not saying I’m happy that you’re dead but I… Oh, I’m making a mess out of this, aren’t I?”

Iris eyes Draco lifting one eyebrow up.

“You didn’t tell me he would be funny,” she whispers loudly at him before turning back to Harry and clearing her throat.

“It’s okay. It’s not so bad I’m dead. I don’t mind. My parents were going to marry me off to a man anyway, so you know, when you weigh up the options, tuberculosis isn’t all that bad,” she continues. “No offence meant, of course, since you’re both men and all that. I just prefer girls by a lot. It wasn’t something I could just tell my parents when I was alive, though. I would have had to marry the bloke and have children and...”

The ghost mimes throwing up then lets out a thrill of laughter.

“Iris told me she was sent to _Le Rosaire_ for treatment in 1935,” Draco says, “she’s one of the many people who passed away here during the time this place functioned as a sanatorium.”

“I can see why you like the building,” Iris cuts in, lounging in mid-air with her legs crossed, “it’s beautiful. My parents sent me here from Lausanne, and I don’t think I’d ever seen a mountain this close before. I remember I loved it here before I got too sick to go outside. They’d let me walk in the mountains for hours. My parents wouldn’t have approved of that, but people here are from a different stock. They respect the way good exercise and mountain air make you feel.”

“As I was saying,” Draco continues with a frown, “there are many ghosts in this place, and they’re very anxious about what you intend to do with the building. It’s been home to them for several decades now, and they’re not keen on being banished or having to share their space with rude hotel guests or businessmen on fancy seminars.”

“I wouldn’t,” Harry says immediately. “I wouldn’t want to make this place anything it isn’t. I don’t mind a few ghosts. I’d like you to stay.”

At these words, Iris swoops down until her ghostly face is almost touching Harry, her eyes wide and bright under her line-thin eyebrows.

“Really?” she asks, twisting a strand of hair around her finger. “Do you mean this? We could really all stay?”

Her face turns serious, as she draws her small dark mouth into a pout. Harry thinks she looks like the star in a silent film, with her carefully applied makeup and the way she flickers in black and white in the stillness of the room.

“There are some ghosts who aren’t the nicest to have around. Mrs Golay, for instance, has failed to learn how to shut up for a single second in the past ninety years she’s been here, and I wouldn’t want to compare her voice to nails on a blackboard but—no, it absolutely sounds the same. Mrs Brodard is awfully racist too. Some of us who died young and tried to keep up with the world as it moved forward have been trying to teach her not to use slurs, but it’s an uphill battle with her. What I’m saying is, they’re not all like me, young and hip and fun. Some of them are… lacking in the human decency and social graces department.” She pauses. “We’d still want them to stay, though!”

“Of course,” Harry answers.

“We’d like to meet them,” Draco adds. “If you’d be so kind as to arrange that for us?”

Iris swoops delightedly, then stills in mid-air, stretching her stocking-clad legs out before her and crossing her legs at the ankle. She’s wearing peep-toe shoes with chunky heels.

“I can try. They’re shy, though. And they won’t be able to speak English, you know? You don't magically learn every language when you’re dead. I only speak it because my mum grew up in England before she came to Switzerland to marry my dad. The rest of them only speak French, with varying degrees of awful, thick accents, might I add. Some people like Mrs Kolly never left the village where they were born before coming here, and it really shows. Then, there’s Greta and Vreni, and they speak Swiss-German, but I don’t think that’s going to help you to understand them more. Even we don’t always understand what they’re trying to say. You’d think some people lose their ability to learn at the same time as their ability to breathe, from the way they act! A hundred years to pick up a new language and they still can’t manage a proper sentence…”

She shakes her head like a stern, disappointed matron, then laughs before adding: “It’s okay. I’ll translate.”

“We’d be glad if you did,” Harry answers. “I look forward to meeting them.”

* * *

Later that night, after they’ve gone back to their inn, Draco knocks on Harry’s door. He’s wearing the same soft cashmere sweater but he’s changed into a pair of flannel trousers and there is a certain domestic softness about it that fills the well of Harry’s chest with all sorts of dangerous feelings.

“I’m pretty certain the ghosts are why the house won’t bond with you,” Draco tells Harry as he stands in the middle of his room, mere metres away from his bed. (Harry thinks he’ll burst with the thought.) “They’ve lived there for years. The house has to be protective of them. After all, it failed them, hasn’t it? It was a sanatorium, it was meant to be a place of healing, not a place of death. I think it feels guilty still and it’s trying to protect the ghosts in any way it can.”

“So you’re telling me that if I promise the ghosts they can stay and if the house believes me,” Harry answers slowly, “it’ll let me bond with it?”

“I think so. I really do. We’ll see tomorrow, won’t we?” 

Draco turns to leave.

“Thank you,” Harry says softly as Draco opens the door. “For helping. I know it was a lot to ask. I’m grateful you agreed.”

“It’s the least I could do,” Draco replies with a sad sort of smile at the corner of his lips, “after everything that happened.”

When he closes the door, Harry falls back onto his bed and closes his eyes, trying to imagine there’s another body here with him. He does not even pretend he doesn’t want it to be Draco.

* * *

It was not always bad, being in love with Draco Malfoy.

In a lot of ways, it stuck needles through Harry’s lungs and turned heart to dust, but there were also the good bits. There was the way Draco looked at Harry right after they kissed sometimes, with a reverent sort of wonder. The way Draco would trail his fingers along Harry’s chest and whisper in his ear that _I want you, Harry. I want you to take me._

There was something different about Draco in those moments where they were both naked and panting, something open and vulnerable that went straight through Harry’s heart. There was something in the way he let Harry pull him apart slowly, with his fingers and tongue and cock, the way he moaned Harry’s name as Harry plunged deep into the tight heat of him. It drove Harry entirely mad with desire. Entirely mad with an abominable kind of love too (the kind of love that filled the entire room or flooded the entire city. The kind of love that might have been infinite, had Harry let it.)

_You’re everything,_ Harry would whisper into Draco’s ear with fingers digging bruises in the soft flesh of his hips. _You’re everything I ever wanted. You’re everything I ever needed._ ( _I love you,_ he didn’t say. _I love you more than my life._ ) Draco never answered in kind, of course, but he looked like an ice shelf fissuring, bright and broken, as he whispered _Harryharryharry._ And sometimes, Harry could hear the confession in the sound of his own name.

There were the times when Draco took his time taking Harry apart too, with his fingers and tongue. He’d be gentle, then. Reverent. He’d lick and caress every inch of skin, unbearably slow and bone-shatteringly careful, whispering words of affirmation all the while ( _You’re beautiful_ and _Oh my gorgeous boy_ and _I’ll make you feel so good_ and _Come for me, Harry, come for me._ ) When Harry finally felt the cresting waves of orgasm wash over him like a tsunami, and shudder-moaned Draco’s name, Draco would hold him tight, telling him all the while that _you’re so beautiful, Harry. You’re so gorgeous when you come undone. I want you so much._

That night, when Harry lets his hand snake across his belly and down into his pyjama bottoms, he thinks of all the good bits and nothing else.

* * *

The next morning, Draco’s already spent most of the morning at the house when Harry arrives. There was a meeting with the historical building committee he needed to attend. He presented his plans for the renovation, and some people on the committee brought him archive pictures of how the _Rosaire_ once looked. It might be a while, they said, until the plans were formally approved, but the renovation was respectful of the soul and the structure of the building, so they were confident approval would ultimately be delivered. Still, Harry felt oddly out of place in this bright meeting room in the historical city centre of Fribourg, where there was a river snaking between the grey-stone houses and high cliffs towering above him, but not a mountain in sight.

When Harry makes it back to the _Rosaire_ , Draco’s waiting for him on the balcony. It’s a beautiful day, the spring sunshine warm and generous and flooding everything with light.

“I’ve talked with the ghosts,” Draco says as Harry leans against the balustrade next to him. “Mrs Brodard is every bit as awful as Iris said she was, but I don’t think they’ll be a problem. They’re all rather excited to have living people in the house again, and they’re relieved they get to stay.”

Harry smiles.

“Thank you.”

Draco doesn’t turn his head towards Harry. Cows are grazing in a lush green field, their bells echoing throughout the valley. The mountains are still snow-capped, a stark contrast to the way spring unfurled wildflowers and thick grasses at their foot. He lets out a long breath.

“I’m happy you’re saving that house,” he says softly. “It’s beautiful. I can understand why you felt called to it.”

All sorts of conflicting feelings immediately bubble up inside Harry’s chest at the words. He is speaking before he can stop himself.

“Thank you, for helping out. I wouldn’t have been able to do it without you, and you really didn’t have to help, considering how things ended between us. I’m glad you agreed to help, though. I’m glad we’re doing this together.” 

( _Just this once, and never again_.)

“I…” Draco starts, then stops to run a hand over his face. “It can’t have been easy being with me,” he continues, quieter. “I wasn’t the best boyfriend. Hell, I was pretty shit, if I’m honest. I was in a pretty shit place too.”

“I know.” Harry huffs a dry little laugh. “We both were. Not easy living through a war before you’re even properly an adult, is it? It broke me, but you were broken too. You shouldn’t have been expected to fix me.”

“I wanted to, you know?” Draco’s tissue paper voice is barely louder than a whisper, all tear-stained and fragile. “Fix you. Make you happy. Deserve you, even. I really wanted to. I went about it all the wrong way, though. I’m sorry.” 

There are tears burning behind Harry’s eyes. He stares at the sun and tries not to cry.

“It’s okay. You did the best you could. I’ve forgiven you a long time ago.”

“No, no.” Draco grabs Harry’s wrists in his hands, and the contact of his skin strikes Harry like lightning. “Don’t. Don’t say that. You’ve always done that, you’ve always made your pain invisible, negligible. You’ve always forgiven and understood. I hurt you, Harry. I really did. I can see it now, and I could see it then, but I didn’t know how to do anything else. I thought it meant I was too broken for love, at the time. Still do, if I’m honest, but I regret hurting you. You deserved someone better than me, Harry. You deserved someone who could love you in all the right ways, who could tell you with all the right words exactly what you meant to them.”

“I loved you, you know,” Harry half-whispers half-sobs. Draco’s fingers are still on his wrists, and Harry hopes they stay there forever. “I loved you more than anything, Draco. It scared me, sometimes, how much I loved you. I would have done anything for you. I’m sorry it was never enough, this love. I’m sorry I couldn’t be what you needed. But I loved you, and I loved you, and I loved you until it bled me completely dry. That’s why I ran. That’s why I didn’t tell you where I went, didn’t go back to break up with you. I loved you to the breaking point, and I loved you beyond that even, and one day, it was finally too much and I realised I had fallen apart long ago and had simply refused to accept it. I had to run to build myself back together, you understand? It wasn’t that I didn’t love you—it was that I loved you too much for too long and I had to remember how to be loved as well.”

“I loved you,” Draco says, staring into the distance with tears on his face. “I loved you so much. I was too broken to tell you, too afraid of rejection. Too afraid you’d leave one day and I’d be left with a hollow heart and no way of ever patching myself up. I loved you and it broke my heart, seeing you give and give and give everything you could to people who never deserved it. It broke me to see you attend memorials and galas and speeches. You always came back so drained and were sad for days afterwards, but still, you went. I could never protect you like I wanted. I never knew what to do about it. I wish I could have told you this then. Told you how much I loved you. Begged you to keep what little flame of happiness you had in your heart, to let me tend to it until it turned into a fire again. I could never, and then you left. It was my fault, but it still hurt, you know? It was important to me, what we had. You were important to me. I wish we could have said goodbye.”

At the words, Harry pulls Draco into a hug and holds him tight, in the glorious sunlight of early afternoon. The air smells like monk’s rhubarb and goosefoot. They do not let go for a very long time.

* * *

It wasn’t a conscious decision, breaking up with Draco; it was one Harry only realised he’d taken once it was over with, and by then, he was already too far gone to do anything about it.

It started with the weight of expectations breaking Harry’s back as Draco and he were putting the finishing touches to Grimmauld Place (the house entirely habitable by then, with every dark spell washed away from the walls and every awful portrait safely burned or hidden or locked away in a vault.)

It was one of the bad days. Draco hadn’t talked to him since they arrived that morning and refused to admit there was anything wrong despite Harry’s insistence. By mid-afternoon, every organ in Harry’s chest had liquefied into an infinite ocean of sadness and injustice and he was trying to spell the black wallpaper off of the walls in what he imagined would be his study. It wasn’t an easy task: the wallpaper was resisting with everything it had, tearing in long strips and always leaving dark residue on the plaster behind. Frustration left wet trails on Harry’s cheeks as he fired his spells ragingly at the walls over, and over, and over, and over again.

Draco eventually noticed.

“I feel like I’m drowning in the pressure of everything,” Harry told him when he didn’t ask. “I can’t even take wallpaper down and my own home hates me—how can I be expected to keep smiling at cameras and lie to everyone that I knew what I was doing in that forest and not actively trying to get myself killed. I know they need me to be their symbol of hope, I know they need me to tell them it wasn’t in vain, the pain and the loss and the grief. But I can’t! I can’t! I don’t even know it myself!”

Draco leaned against the wall, pinching the bridge of his nose with his fingers.

“You shouldn’t be expected to, Harry. It’s not right. This whole rotten thing never was, can’t you see? They were adults and you were a child, you should never have been expected to put yourself at risk to save them.”

“What other choice did they have?” As the words left Harry’s mouth, he knew with unbearable certainty the topic would lead to another screaming match. It always did. “It’s not like they wanted me to get hurt or killed, it was just a choice between me and the rest of the world, really. My life wasn’t worth everyone else’s.”

“There wasn’t any other choice because they never bothered to look for one!” Draco roared.

It was awful and it hurt, seeing Draco so distraught, fists clenched tight and mouth drawn, but there was a little piece of Harry, there, right there, at the bottom of him, that was glad of it. (At least Draco was looking at him now. At least Draco was talking to him now.)

“And you know that because you were there, weren’t you?” that little piece of Harry answered. “Funny, I thought you were hiding away at the Manor between your blood purist parents until things went to shit and you had to grow a spine and a heart. These people, Draco, these people you’re talking about—they loved me. Dumbledore was the closest thing to a father I ever had, and he wouldn’t have sent me to my death if there had been any other way. He died for this too, remember? You were there. Should I refresh your memory? You almost killed him. Did you look for any other choices before you went up those stairs with a wand in your hand to kill an unsuspecting old man?”

The words seemed to hit Draco harder than Harry had anticipated. He leaned back against the wall, knuckles white and cheeks burning red. He stilled for a moment, took a ragged breath and closed his eyes. Then, he opened them slowly and when he spoke again, his voice was measured and quiet.

“I’m not saying I did everything right, Harry. You know that as well as I do. You know exactly how much I regret my past actions, and how much I loathe my former self. I will not begrudge you for bringing it up: I was wrong in every single one of my beliefs then and too comfortable in my own sheltered life to change. Let me say this, though: you’re miserable because you want to be. I keep telling you, over and over again, that you need to put yourself first. And you keep not listening to me. I can’t save you, Harry. I can’t help you if you aren’t willing to change. You’re in love with your hero status, and you’re in love with your sadness, and there’s nothing I will ever be able to do about that, is there? It breaks me, watching you crumble down time and time again because the Ministry called and they want you to talk at some stupid function or other. It exhausts me, having to piece you back together again because you gave them everything you had and there’s nothing left for you anymore. You can’t expect me to watch you fall apart time and time again, I’m not strong enough for that. You need to save yourself, Harry. I can’t be there for you if you don’t.”

The words sliced through Harry’s skin, _I can’t be there for you_ and _you can’t expect me to_ cutting his heart into ribbons. Pain radiated in his chest as he forgot how to breathe or how to talk or how to cry. In the silence, Draco moved swiftly towards the door. A soft click: Harry was alone.

“I need you,” he told the emptiness around him.

He fell to his knees.

“I can’t save myself,” he sobbed, “I can’t save myself without you. I don’t know how.”

As Harry ran his hands over his face, he found his cheeks were wet.

“Please don’t leave me, Draco. Please don’t leave me.”

Then, the anxiety constricted his lungs and filled his mouth with cotton wool, and there were no words left to say anymore. All Harry could do was shake helplessly in the cold silence of an empty house, with hands clutching his heart and tears streaming down his face.

* * *

Later that night, desperate and drunk out of his mind, Harry Apparated to Hermione’s flat.

“I don’t think we’re working out, Draco and I,” he sobbed into her hair as she drew him into a tight hug, her face full of concern.

“Hush, darling,” she whispered back, her hands warm on his back. “He’ll come around. Give him time.”

* * *

Draco did not come around. 

It took Harry a week of desperate hope and bitter disappointment to decide he needed to turn over a new leaf. A clean break, in a new place. Somewhere he could start putting himself back together.

“Charlie could use help with the dragons,” Ron suggested one day over a late evening cup of tea. Harry had been telling them he couldn’t stand the idea of going back to Grimmauld Place when every single room was still filled with memories of Draco. He couldn’t stand facing them yet. “I could owl him if you liked. Might do you good to be on your own, for a bit… Go back to nature, you know. Supposed to heal you and all that.”

Harry took a Portkey to Romania the very next day.

* * *

Harry’s almost ready for bed by the time there’s a soft knock in his door that evening. Draco’s in the corridor, wearing the same soft jumper and flannel trousers as the day before.

“I’ve been thinking about the bonding ritual,” he says as Harry steps aside to let him in.

“I shouldn’t have brought your role in the war into our argument,” Harry replies. He’s well aware this is not what he’s supposed to say, but the words have been burning his lips for too long and he finds he cannot keep them in his mouth any longer. “On the day we broke up. I’ve been thinking about it, and it was uncalled for. I’m sorry. It hurt at the time, that you left, but I understand why you did now.”

Draco deflates at the memory and runs his hands over his face.

“No, you were right. It did hurt, but you were right. You had all that weight on your shoulders and I didn’t want to hear about it. You tried to tell me what you were going through, you tried to make me understand, and I didn’t want to listen. I wanted you to be happy again, and I wanted it to happen without having to do any of the work of supporting you. I’m sorry, Harry. I really am.”

“I thought you didn’t love me,” Harry admits, sitting on the bed and staring at the tarnished pine boards under his feet. “I thought it was what it meant.”

Harry feels a weight next to him on the bed and a warm palm on his hand.

“How can you ever have thought that, Harry?” Draco’s face is cracked open by a bright kind of pain, and Harry finds that he can’t remember how to breathe. “I loved you so much. I loved you more than life itself. It wouldn’t have hurt so much if I hadn’t loved you with everything I had.”

“I loved you too.”

Harry takes Draco’s hand into his, closes his fingers over the slender palms. Draco closes his eyes.

“I loved you so much, Draco,” Harry continues, the words spilling from his lips like water breaking from a dam, “I couldn’t deal with how much I loved you. I don’t know how I would have made it through the first months after the war without you. And even later, even when it hurt so bad, it was still beautiful, you know? It was still everything.”

Draco’s eyes are still closed, and his face is a renaissance painting in the low light of the bedside table (A pained Madonna without a child. Saint Catherine walking to the wheel.) There are no tears on his cheeks, but when he speaks again, his voice is ocean-wet and bark-rough.

“I couldn’t stand the thought I was loved, back then. I didn’t think I deserved it. It hurt too much. I couldn’t tell you I loved you either, I was so afraid to let you down. In the end, it’s exactly what I did, isn’t it?”

Harry raises his hand not holding Draco’s and gently runs his fingers down Draco’s cheek. Draco’s breath hitches softy.

“I’m so sorry I couldn’t tell you how much I loved you,” Draco continues in a broken whisper, “I don’t think I’ve ever loved someone as much as I loved you. I don’t think I ever will again, you know? Some days, I feel like you were my soulmate and I’ve missed my chance at being with you. Some days, I almost can’t live with myself for not having held onto you. But I wasn’t in a good place then, and I couldn’t do things any differently, and I just need to learn how to forgive myself for it.”

“You still could. Hold onto me. Draco, Draco look at me. I still miss you. I’ve spent the past five years going from country to country, never settling down anyway, restless and ever-moving, just to forget I still missed you like a broken tooth or a severed limb.”

“I think I still love you, Harry.” Draco’s face is inches away from Harry’s now, and Harry catalogues the soft eyelashes, the alabaster skin and the quicksilver eyes. Everything in that face is beauty and pain all at once, like diving in the arctic ocean or staring at the sun, and Harry knows he loves Draco too. That he has loved him through years and continents and hasn’t ever stopped, not for a single second.

When they finally kiss, it’s slow and tentative at first, like a peace treaty after an endless war or the first signs of spring after a long winter. Harry cups Draco’s face in his hands, and Draco runs his fingers through Harry’s hair. When they finally break apart, they stare at each other, wet-eyed and unmoving, their faces all painted in awe and disbelief and a fragile sort of hope.

“Oh Draco,” Harry finally whispers. “Oh, Draco, god, I love you.”

Their kisses turn savage after that, full of bruising fingers and teeth and love confessions hissed against hot skin.

_I love you, I love you, I love you._

“I want you,” Draco kisses into the skin of Harry’s neck, and Harry thinks he could weep from the words.

“Yes,” Harry whimpers. “Oh, Draco, yes.”

Then, Draco finally touches Harry, finally palms his cock in warm hands, and Harry thinks he will go entirely mad with the friction and the pressure and the mere thought that it’s Draco touching him (finally, finally, finally.) 

Draco runs his fingers over the skin of Harry’s chest and around his erect nipples as he pumps Harry’s cock in long, slow strokes, and desire builds in Harry’s chest, bone-shattering and bright.

“You’re beautiful,” he whispers against the skin of Harry’s shoulder, bared by the way his pyjama shirt fell to the side. “You’re so gorgeous, Harry. So incredibly gorgeous.”

“Oh Draco, Draco,” Harry moans. He’s entirely undone and entirely open, laying on the bed half-delirious with ecstasy and entirely consumed by every feeling he’s desperately been trying to forget for years. (It will ruin him, this love. It will make firewood out of him, it will reduce him to ash.)

Draco lets out a pained whimper at the sound of his name and licks a wet stripe along Harry’s collar bone without slowing the punishing motion of his hands, inexorable and pleasure-quick.

Then, he stops, and cups Harry’s face in his hands. 

“I want you inside me,” he says, his quicksilver eyes burning with a beautiful sort of passion. “I want to feel you, I want to be yours. Oh for tonight, just for tonight, I want to be yours.”

There are no words inside Harry’s mouth, then. They’ve all been replaced by desire as violent as a tidal wave and as destructive as a forest fire. He pulls at Draco’s jumper and fumbles with his belt. Draco throws his head back and whispers Harry’s name like a binding spell.

Then, they’re both naked, and the contact of Draco’s skin on Harry’s is electrifying and they crash together again like magnets or tectonic plates.

“I want to touch you,” Harry whispers, running his hand down Draco’s back, further down, further down, until they’re rubbing small circles around Draco’s puckered hole. Draco arches his back as he cries out in pleasure, and he’s _beautifulbeautifulbeautiful._ (I _f beauty could cut, you’d slice me into clean halves_ , Harry thinks, delirious with arousal. _If love could burn, I’d be made entirely of tinder and dry straw and you’d be a spark or a match or a fire in the night._ )

“I want to learn you by heart,” Harry continues as he slips a wet finger into the tight heat and Draco bites down a cry, “the whole of you. I want to know every inch of beautiful skin, every curve and every edge.”

Under his fingers, Draco comes apart. The room fills with sounds of ecstasy (moans and whimpers and sighs.) “Let me come inside you,” Harry begs, his voice rough with pleasure and desire and anticipation all at once.

They shift until Draco’s laying flat on his back on the bed, and Harry’s positioned between his legs. (Harry’s chest fills with fireworks at the sight of this beautiful man under him, willing and undone, kissed and touched and so entirely loved.) He pushes inside Draco, and it’s— _oh_ too much, it’s entirely too much, and Harry thinks he’ll die with the overwhelming sensation of it, but Draco whimpers and cries out Harry’s name every time Harry moves just so, _oh_ just so, _oh don’t stop, don’t stop_ and Harry’s filled with pleasure so bright that Harry thinks his lighthouse heart must light up the entire room—the entire city even. The entire country, perhaps. So he does not die, and he does not stop moving inside Draco, he does not stop turning into a beacon of hope and pleasure and he does not stop calling out Draco’s name.

“I, oh, I love you—oh Harry, oh love, oh love, oh,” Draco cries under him, grabbing the mattress with both hands as he lifts his hips to meet Harry’s thrust. “You feel so good, oh you feel so good, oh Harry, you make me feel so good. Oh, Harry, I’d forgotten. Oh don’t stop, don’t stop...”

“You have me now,” Harry wants to say, and: “you don’t have to forget ever again,” but he finds that every syllable that comes out of his mouth is forever a rosary of _I love you, I love you, I love you._

“Oh, love, oh love,” Draco answers in a litany of his own, “don’t stop, oh don’t stop… Yes, yes…”

Then, Draco finally comes, shuddering beautifully under Harry’s fingers and clenching around Harry’s cock, and Harry is filled with more pleasure than he’s ever experienced before (his vision goes white with it, his heart glows bright with it.)

“I love you,” Draco says as he holds Harry through his orgasm. Inside Harry’s chest, happiness pools warm and rich, like honey or gold.

* * *

The first thought Harry had when he arrived at the dragon sanctuary was that Romania was breathtaking. Everyone was lovely, and looking after dragons was hard physical work, the kind that made Harry’s body tired and heavy at the end of the day, the kind that stilled his thoughts in his head and wrapped all his anxieties in the gauze of exhaustion. Still, it wasn’t enough.

Harry barely lasted six months until he decided he needed a change of scenery again. Luna was in Iceland, at the time, looking for an imaginary animal or other and suggested Harry join her. Harry did, and he spent weeks traipsing through volcanic rocks and along jagged cliffs above the sea. Then, as surely as he did the first time, he grew restless again.

He took Portkeys to anywhere, after that, visiting most of Europe and half of Africa. He walked through the arid heat of deserts and through lush oases. He stood on the edge of the Bering sea and watched the ice crack slowly in the tentative heat of spring, and he stood in the bogs of Denmark thinking about the people who had once died there and who might lie underneath his feet still.

It wasn’t until he came to Switzerland that he finally found a place that cast a hook in his heart. It wasn’t until he saw the _Rosaire_ that he finally felt like he had arrived home.

* * *

The _Rosaire_ is beautiful in the early morning sun.

Harry and Draco walk up the winding path in silence, taking in the mountains and the meadows and each other’s comforting presence. Then, Iris appears behind one of the large Lebanon cedar trees and nothing is quiet anymore.

“I did like you asked, Draco,” she announces, a mischievous smile dancing over her round little face. “Everyone has agreed to meet you both today. Not that it was easy, mind you. Agnès, the absolute bint, kept complaining that it was too early for her to be up and that she needed her beauty sleep. It’s quite incredible, the way some people have no concept of what being dead entails.”

Iris rolls her eyes and swoops nearer to them.

“I told her we’d do it without her,” she adds, clearly delighted by her own story. “I know she hates feeling left out.”

Harry smiles and thanks her as he walks on, slowly. Iris floats gently beside him. Draco trails slightly behind.

“I will translate for you,” Iris continues. “This time, mind you. I won’t always be around. I’d say I have a life of my own, but clearly, I don’t. Still, I might have better things to do, you know? A girl can hope! So… As I was saying. I’ll translate for you into French, and then Annemarie said she would translate into Swiss German for Greta and Vreni. So we all know what you’re saying and we can give informed consent—that’s the phrase, isn’t it? Informed consent? Or was it enthusiastic consent?”

“I’d like you to give both,” Harry smiles as he stops in front of the front doors. “But informed consent is important. I want you to agree with my vision for the place.”

“Ha! See, I told you I was keeping up with the real world! Well, what are you waiting for? Open the door! Let’s get in! Let’s go meet everybody!”

Harry turns the key in the lock and pushes the door, Iris goes straight through the wall and swoops a few times in mid-air before disappearing again.

“Upstairs! Hurry up!” The faint echo of her voice rings in the empty room.

Draco has stopped in the garden and is staring at the house like the world is ending. 

“Come on,” Harry tells him as he makes his way into the corridor and up the stairs.

The ghosts are friendly and chatty and very interested in Harry’s plans for the restoration.

“I want this building to look the exact way it did when it was first built,” Harry tells them. And: “I want it to be a place of beauty again, I want it to be a symbol of pride for the valley again, but most importantly, I want it to be a place for healing again.” 

An excited whisper runs throughout the room.

“There will be a part of the house for you, I promise. There will be an entire wing where no one will ever come without your explicit permission,” Harry continues. There is some ghostly clapping and a loud whoop from Iris. “That doesn’t mean you won’t have access to the rest of the building, of course, but I’ll need you to cohabit with the living as best you can there.”

A plump lady dressed in a flowing silk dress and t-strap heels asks what kind of living people Harry is talking about exactly. Her tone is commanding, the question precisely-worded and incisive. Harry thinks she might one day have been a press journalist. He half expects her to take out a quill and start grilling him if he’s honest.

“I want this place to be a safe haven for magical and squib teens who need a break from the world while they deal with stress or trauma or any kind of mental illness,” Harry answers, his voice suddenly more serious than he would like. ( _I want this to be the place I would have needed when I was eighteen and broken beyond repair,_ he doesn’t say.)

“Vous êtes un brave homme don’,” Mrs Brodard tells Harry in the reverent silence of the room. "C'est une ben bonne chose q’vous faites là. Une ben bonne chose. Si mon Henri, l’avait eu un endroit comme c’ui là…” 

Her voice breaks and there are tears on her cheeks. Iris doesn’t translate but Harry understands the grief well enough. He’s lost someone he loved too, once. As whispers run through the assembly of ghosts, Harry makes out the words _son_ and _suicide_.

“Vous avez ma bénédiction,” Mrs Brodard continues, her voice rough but firm.

“Vous avez la mienne,” says an old woman wearing what appears to be a nightdress and slippers.

“Et la mienne,” a woman in a stiff woollen suit adds.

Then, every ghost is speaking at once, assuring Harry of their consent and talking excitedly among themselves about how it will feel to share their space with the living once again.

“Silence!” Iris eventually commands. “We have a bonding ritual to complete!” she adds, first in French, then again in English. 

“I think that will be enough, don’t you?” she asks Draco, who’s leaning against the wall in a corner of the room, face pale and spine stiff. When he smiles, there is sadness behind his eyes.

“That will do very nicely, Iris. Thank you,” he says softly as he takes out his wand.

The ghosts move away from Harry as Draco starts the intricate incantation. The glittering gold patterns that shoot from his wand climb like ivy on every wall, gorgeous and mesmerising. Harry casts his half of the spell too, then: cool blue light washing over him and diving deep inside his flesh to pool in his magical core.

There is an instant of blinding brightness, and Harry feels like he’s grown another pair of lungs suddenly. He can feel the house breathe underneath his skin. He can feel the loneliness of it, the slow decay—and the hope for a better future too, shining warm and bright behind his ribs.

The ghosts must feel it too, and they begin to cheer and clap and laugh. Each and every one of them wants to congratulate Harry. There are questions too, and suggestions. Sœur Félicie wants Harry to know exactly how the place looked back in its heyday. She was the head caretaker, she tells Harry with pride. Made the floors gleam every morning and cleaned every window at least once a week. Before Harry can thank her, the ghost of a tall, slender woman in pressed trousers and a crisp shirt, wearing suspenders and holding a pipe informs Harry that she was an architect once and demands to see the plans. Harry answers every question, listens to every story and discusses the renovation plans with the architect for hours. By the time each ghost has had their say and bids Harry goodbye, he realises he’s alone in the room.

Draco has gone.

* * *

Draco’s almost done packing when Harry barges into his room, and the sight of the suitcase punches the air straight out of Harry’s lungs. Draco steadfastly doesn’t look at him; he folds another shirt instead.

“Draco…” Harry starts, feeling like he’s standing in the epicentre of an earthquake (wishing the ground might do him the kindness of swallowing him alive.)

“I’m leaving,” Draco answers softly, still folding the same shirt. (One sleeve, then the other, then unfolding it again.) Still not looking at Harry. “Just this once, remember?”

The words are a silver bullet through Harry’s heart, and Harry thinks his thick jumper might grow red with the impact of them (a pain-peony blooming warm and wet across the cable-stitched wool.). He wants to punch Draco or to kiss him or to fall apart entirely. _You said you loved me,_ he wants to scream. He wants to tear out his hair or crush Draco’s wrists between his fingers or pin him against the wall and kiss him like a wolf bites.

He does none of those things.

“Don’t,” he whispers instead, staring at his hands and without moving even an inch. “We could be happy, Draco. This time around, we could make it work.”

“I want to, Harry. I really do. But—I don’t think I can.” Draco’s face is tear-stained and fractured by a deafening sort of pain. “I’m still the same person I always was. You’re still the same person, too. People don’t change, not that much, and the thing that broke us apart in the end? It was so much bigger than either of us. It was the weight of the war and the wounds on our souls and the darkness that will always live at the bottom of our chests. We both know it’s never going to work between us.”

Harry sobs softly at the words, standing statue-still and grief-frozen.

“And I don’t think I can make it through another breakup, Harry. Not again, not with you. It hurt me too much the last time. Believe me when I say I barely made it out alive. I can’t do that again, Harry. I just can’t. I’m sorry.”

The words dance around Harry’s ears like angry wasps, maddening and terrifying all at once. This can’t be happening, not now, not when they had finally found each other again. (Not when Draco held him and touched him and kissed him. Not when Draco finally told him he loved him after years of silence. Not now, not now not now.)

“Stay,” Harry begs—or perhaps he doesn’t say anything at all, perhaps there are no words spilling from his lips, only unadulterated loss, violent like a waterfall.

Draco sobs quietly, shoulders shaking.

“Stay,” Harry says again, taking Draco’s wrist in his hands and holding them as gently as if they are a fragile heirloom or an injured bird. “Stay—please, Draco. Please. I’ll be better. I promise I will. I’ll change. I’ve changed already. Stay, Draco. Stay for me. Please. We’ll make it work this time, I promise.”

Draco doesn’t move. Doesn’t say anything. Tears run silently down his cheeks and kiss the corners of his mouth. (Harry’s heart breaks at the sight.)

“Haven’t we been happy, this past week? Haven’t we been good for each other? Draco, we could have this. It could be you and me and a crowd of ghosts in an empty building. We could build things back together slowly: the house, our relationship too. And when all the floors are waxed, when all the walls are white and all the windows clean, we’d realise all our old pain has been painted over by new memories too. We could be happy here, Draco. I could be happy with you. I could make you happy if you let me.”

Slowly, Draco pulls away and brings his wrists to his chest, his face split open by pain and regret. There is something different there too, something harder and sharper like resolve. (Harry suddenly knows Draco is not going to stay.)

“We don’t have to live here, not if you don’t want to.” (And it breaks Harry’s heart, the thought he could leave this place, but he’s desperate and he’s falling apart, so the words tumble from his mouth all the same.) “I’d leave this behind for you. We could go anywhere you wanted. I’d follow you. I’d never complain, not as long as I could hold your hand and kiss your hair. We could go live at the Manor. We could never go back to England again. We could start anew anywhere, Draco, anywhere you wanted. I would be good, Draco. Oh, I would be quiet and soft and I would never hurt you again. You wouldn’t even notice I’m there, I promise, Draco. I promise. Just don’t leave me behind. Oh, please, don’t leave me behind. “

“Don’t…”

Draco’s voice is breaking and broken, a landslide of hurt and infinite sadness. He does not look at Harry.

“Please, Harry, I beg you. Don’t make me stay…”

His voice dies out and Harry forgets how to breathe.

“I love you,” Draco continues after a while, raising his grey-storm eyes to meet Harry’s. “I love you more than I can say, and I want to stay more than anything. But I can’t. I can’t. I’m so sorry, Harry. I wish I was a better person. A stronger person. Someone who could stand the pain of losing you a second time, or someone reckless enough to take the risk. But you’re the sun, Harry, and I’m forever going to be Icarus—flying too close and burning my wings and falling to my death. I’m sorry, Harry. I’m so, so sorry….”

Draco is crying in earnest now, sobs shaking his thin frame as he buries his face in his hands. Gently, Harry pulls him close and into a hug. Draco doesn’t stop crying, and Harry rubs circles onto his back as a terrible kind of sadness submerges him like a heartbreak-ocean until he is drowning in the undertow.

“I’m sorry too,” Harry whispers. “I’m sorry that it ended the first time. I’m sorry that I hurt you. I love you, Draco. I always will. I respect that you need to leave. It’s okay. I wish we had more time, I wish life had been kinder too.”

Draco nods and cries and doesn’t say anything else. Harry kisses his hair, then slowly lets his arms fall to his sides and takes a step back. Draco doesn’t look at him.

“Goodbye,” Harry whispers as he closes the door behind him. 

The next day, Draco is gone.

* * *

Harry can still feel the hum of the house inside his chest, he can still feel the hope and the life of it. When he tries to paint the walls of the upstairs bedroom the next morning, the paint does not fall to the floor in strips.

He’s done it, he thinks. The house is his, now. His to love and cherish and restore to its former glory. It’s what he’s always wanted, isn’t it? He should be happy, now. Grateful, at least. Counting his blessings and finding silver linings.

( _We’ve done it_ , he thinks, and it cuts him in half like a guillotine.)

Harry walks back to the inn. He crawls into bed and tries to forget he’s awake and breathing and alive.

* * *

The days pass in a blur of tears and sleep and unbearable pain.

Sometimes, something in Harry’s chest breaks and the world turns silent and grey. It never lasts, not really, and the loud brightness of reality always finds a way to open him up again like a sharp blade in an oyster shell. Still, in every single one of these grey instants, Harry goes back to the _Rosaire_. He walks through every room, opens one of the numerous pots of paint sitting like silent soldiers against the wall in the corridor, paints a room, or two, or three, or however many he manages before pain breaks him in half again.

This is how Harry finds himself in the chapel, hollow-hearted and paint-speckled, almost two weeks after Draco left. It is every bit as beautiful as it was the first time Harry saw it: light is still pouring in and leaving watercolour-puddles on the flagstone floor and the wooden pews are still dust-covered and finger-polished by the years. Harry sits silently as if to pray. Then, he closes his eyes and tries to pull the past week out of his memory like a weed (tries to dig it out of his flesh like a splinter or a bullet, tries to spit it out like a mouthful of gravel or sand.)

Nothing works and his heart keeps beating slow and steady in the unbearable emptiness in his chest as the name of the only person he will ever want sits on his tongue and sticks to the roof of his mouth like honey.

“So he left.”

Iris’ voice is firm and matter-of-fact. Harry does not open his eyes, does not lift his head from the soft, dark wood of the pew.

“He was never going to stay,” Harry whispers, as if to himself, in the hallowed silence. “He’s done what he came here for, so he left.”

“And what did he come here for exactly, to break your heart? Was that your deal? I’m not one to judge, but that sounds like an incredibly ill-conceived plan if it was.”

There is no sympathy in Iris’ voice, but it is not unkind. She sounds like she’s caught an unruly child or an over-eager dog doing something abominably stupid, and she’s trying to understand how on earth they ever thought that idea was going to work.

“He came to fix the house, you know?” Harry sighs. She’s become a friend in the short time he’s known her, and he knows Draco considered her one too. If she’s never going to see him again, she deserves an explanation at least. “I asked him and he said he would help me out—just this once, he said, for old time’s sake. Just this once and never again. Whatever happened between us was never planned, and I shouldn’t have assumed that he wasn’t going to leave as soon as he found a way to help me bond with the house.”

“I still don’t understand how that was supposed to work.” 

Harry lifts his head and stares at Iris. She’s hovering in the air and staring right back, an eyebrow cocked up in obvious confusion.

“The house wouldn’t let me bond to it because it was protective of you. Draco’s the one who figured that out after he met you and you introduced him to all the other ghosts. Once I promised I would let you all stay, the house accepted me as its owner. So Draco left.”

Iris’ eyes widen.

“Oh,” she says, and clasps a hand to her mouth, in an old-fashioned sort of gesture.

“Oh no,” she adds in a softer voice. “Darling, you’ve got it all wrong.”

She floats down to Harry and sits her fog-like form down on the pew next to him.

“We’re all glad you promised we could stay, Harry, don’t get me wrong. But it was never about us. It never was about the house either—your magical core was closed off, love. It’s not that you couldn’t bond with the house, it’s that the house couldn’t bond with you.”

Iris lays a soft, cool hand over Harry’s own, then continues:

“When Draco came along, your magical core started to open again. It was a slow process, at first but within a week, your core was lighting up all over like a Christmas tree. We thought that’s what he was helping you with. That’s why I couldn’t understand why he left.”

“He… He never did anything to me.” The air is thick in Harry’s lungs, the words heavy as lead on his tongue. “Not… Like that… Not in the magical sense.”

“He loved you, Harry,” Iris replies, her voice soft and quiet, “and perhaps more importantly, you loved him. Love is a powerful medicine. It has a way of healing all the ailments you don’t realise you have. The ones you don’t want to think about too, perhaps .”

Understanding hits Harry all at once like a tidal wave. He’s spent a lifetime of running away from everything—from grief and from the war, from impotent rage and from heartbreak. From love too, from settling down somewhere and making a home. And it was never healthy, any part of it. Underneath all the Portkeys and the adventures, underneath the silent awe and the solitude, throughout every forest and every desert, on the edge of every cliff and every sea, he was always going to be the heart-broken boy who loved too much and was never loved enough. He was always going to be the grief-crucified boy who lost everyone before he was ever properly grown and who walked to his death before he had ever started to live, and—

“—it’s no use thinking about it, he’s gone now,” Harry bites out. In his words: a barely contained rage at the universe for letting him have the love he’s craved his entire life before taking it away for good, for letting him heal only to tear him apart again.

“What are you going to do about it?” Iris asks, cocking her head slightly to the side.

“Nothing! I’m not going to do anything, Iris! I can’t! Don’t you think I asked him to stay? Don’t you think I begged? He asked me to let him go. He said I hurt him enough already. What was I supposed to do?”

Harry’s voice echoes in the hallowed space like a gunshot, violent and loud and entirely out of place. Iris’ features harden and she furrows her brow.

“He’s an idiot, but Lord help me, you are too!” she replies, jabbing a ghostly finger at the centre of Harry’s chest. “Do you know what I would have given for a chance at love when I was alive? Can you even understand what it feels like for everything you want to be completely impossible? Completely unspeakable? You think you know because you’re so very sad and the one boy you love so very much is being an absolute cretin, but you have no idea. No idea. I’d have had to marry a man, had I lived. I’d have had to kiss him and lie with him and bear his children without ever loving him a single day in my life. And you know what? I would have given anything to find a girl with whom I could make it work. I would have killed for that chance Harry, and I will not watch you throw it away like it’s not worth fighting for!”

Iris pauses, her finger pressing hard and painful against Harry’s sternum for a second before her hand turns intangible again, going straight through Harry’s chest like fog. She sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose as she continues:

“Let me tell you what you’re going to do, Harry, since you’re too stupid to figure it out on your own. You’re going to go to your hotel this very instant, and you’re going to pack your bags, and then, you’re going to Apparate to wherever Draco’s dragged his sorry arse and you’re going to convince him that he needs to take a chance on you, or you’re going to die trying.”

There’s something fierce burning behind Iris’ eyes: it ignites something deep inside Harry’s chest. (Something that has been dormant for a very long time, something like hope or desire or the will to fight.) 

And just like that, Harry decides he’ll go. Immediately, a weight lifts off his shoulders. Immediately, there is laughter bubbling in his throat, and when it spills from his mouth, it echoes against the flagstone floor and reverberates across the vaulted ceiling until Harry can’t tell if Iris has joined in, or if he’s laughing alone, but he finds he doesn’t care because, for the first time in years, his life is his again to steer in the direction he wants. Because, for the first time in years, he wants to take a chance, he wants to jump off that cliff and find out if he can swim. Because, for the first time in years, he’s realised some things are worth fighting for.

“Thank you,” he tells Iris before he leaves, when the laughter has died down and the light outside is beginning to fade.

“Go get him,” she replies with a wink.

* * *

May has covered the grounds of Malfoy Manor with lush leaves and fragrant flowers. There is beauty to be found in every corner of the park: everywhere, lupins offer their pastel-soft, pepper-scented flowers to the sky, and peonies bloom lazily, heavy and fragrant and pink. As Harry walks the path to the house, slow and unhurried, he notices every single one of them.

Harry pulls the heavy bronze handle of the doorbell, and immediately, a house-elf appears.

“What can Plopsy be doing for visitor, Sir?” he asks, dignified and stiff.

When Harry asks for Draco, the elf disappears with a loud pop. There are irises spreading their yellow-purple petals in gouache-fireworks along the facade of the house, and Harry decides it is a good omen. (Still, in his chest, his heart sends his blood crashing against his ribs like waves.)

Then, the door opens and a blond figure is standing in the doorway, and Harry’s heart stops for an instant.

_Draco,_ he thinks before realising the shape is all wrong, the face too round and the hair too long.

“Mrs Malfoy,” he grits out, trying to keep his disappointment in the cage of his teeth.

“Mr Potter,” she answers in a voice that sounds like pearls falling on a marble floor. “I’m afraid Draco is not home at the moment. May I inquire as to the object of your visit?”

Harry hesitates for an instant. It was not supposed to go like this, Draco was supposed to be at the door, and Harry was going to tell him that he loved him, and that he couldn’t live without him, and that he was tired of not fighting for the things that mattered. He knows he shouldn’t tell Draco’s mother any of this, not when she’s standing in the doorway like a Greek statue, beautiful and dignified. Not when the truth is messy and painful and shaped like a secret you lock away behind your ribs and never speak of again. But Harry’s come this far, and lies have been eating holes in his chest like worms for years, so he answers:

“I was going to tell him I love him, and I’m afraid I was going to be extremely persistent about it until he agreed to have me.”

Mrs Malfoy’s face is perfectly composed and perfectly neutral as she politely listens to Harry, her porcelain hands demurely joined together in front of her. Harry continues:

“And you should be warned, I will stay here until he comes back or until you tell me where he is. Because I really cannot stress how important it is that he knows that leaving him the first time was the worst mistake of my entire life and that I am not letting him go once again if I can help it.”

Mrs Malfoy smiles at the words.

“Please come in,” she says, stepping aside, “Let us discuss this in the morning room.”

Harry is led through endless corridors and into a large, airy room with dove-grey walls and antique golden oak furniture. There are flowing white curtains and two beige sofas arranged around a low table on which a bouquet of fresh lilies sit. It does not look anything like the Manor here remembered, where everything was dark and overwrought. Mrs Malfoy is still smiling as she gestures for Harry to sit.

“I’ve been trying to let go of who I was before the war,” she says. “I hope you can tell from the remodelling, though I must confess that interior design was not the most pressing change.” 

Her voice light and matter-of-fact as though she were talking of the weather, but there is steel in her spine and, as she opens a small cabinet and takes out an ornate crystal bottle, her fingers clench around the glass so tightly that her knuckles turn white. 

“Would you like some goblin-made brandy, Mr Potter?”

“Please,” Harry acquiesce. Then, he lets out a brittle little laugh. “I think we all needed to build ourselves anew after the war,” he says, perhaps more to himself than to his interlocutor.

Mrs Malfoy hands him a glass and sits down opposite him.

“I needed it more than most,” she answers, sitting perfectly still and perfectly straight, brandy held daintily in her right hand. “I don’t need to tell you that, you’ve seen it first hand. And I don’t mean only the time you’ve been here before… I mean Draco too. I’m afraid I wasn’t a very good mother. No—no, don’t protest. It is true. I’ve never learned how to express my feelings and when I married Lucius, I soon realised there was safety in politeness and silence. I taught Draco to do the same. I only ever wanted to protect him, you understand?”

Harry lets the warm-amber of the brandy trickle down his throat as image after image of Draco flash in his mind. Draco refusing to hold his hand in public. Draco refusing to meet his friends. The row they had after Harry, hurt and exhausted from never feeling good enough, had told Draco he loved him, despite Draco’s insistence Harry never speak the words. 

Mrs Malfoy takes a sip of her drink. When she speaks again, her voice is clear and perfectly controlled:

“It wasn’t right, I see that now. A child cannot grow up without being allowed to laugh, and cry, and love. But I never had the opportunity when I was a girl myself, and I didn’t know how to tell my own child I loved him more than my life. I hurt him, denying him a normal childhood. I taught him to put up walls that he never knew how to take down, and by the time I realised how much damage I’d done, it was already too late… You’d already left.”

She absentmindedly plays with the understated strand of pearls around her neck. Despite her serene face and her gracious posture, this is not an easy conversation for her, Harry realises. (It is not an easy conversation for him either, learning of a past he’d never looked close enough to see. It’s not an easy conversation at all.)

“He came to the Manor, you know? The day after you left. He stood in the dining room, and he listed everything he blamed me for. I think it took the better part of an hour. He wasn’t dignified about it either: he screamed about the war, and about letting Lucius entertain a genocidal madman, about the loneliness of never feeling that my love was unconditional. Then, he cried as he told me he didn’t know how to be loved. It ruined his relationship with you, he said, and he didn’t want his relationship with me to go the same way. I cried too, that day, for the first time since I was a child.”

“It didn’t ruin his relationship with me,” Harry answers because what else can he say? Despite her graceful posture and soft voice, there is unbearable pain in Mrs Malfoy’s words. There are admissions of guilt like bruises on her skin. (Regret like broken bones just underneath the surface.) “He could have come back. I would have forgiven him in a heartbeat.”

“He was ashamed,” Mrs Malfoy answers softly. “I’m afraid I taught him that too—in a world where only perfection is good enough, forgiveness is an unbearable reminder that you failed. He might be able to accept it now, but you must be certain you’re able to offer it. My son has suffered so much already and I can’t bear to watch him hurt any more—please, don’t break his heart again.”

“I won't,” Harry breathes. “I promise you, I won’t. There is nothing to forgive that hasn’t already been forgiven years ago. Tell me where he is. Let me make this right. Please.”

“He’s in Sweden,” she answers in a soft voice. “A place called Marstrand. He always goes there when he’s not doing well. There’s something about the sea, I think. Something that always makes him feel better.”

When Harry thanks her and shakes her hand, Mrs Malfoy’s cheeks are perfectly dry and her face perfectly composed, but when she smiles at him, there is an ocean of sadness and regret dancing across the tight line of her lips.

* * *

Marstrand is beautiful and quiet, with cobbled streets and old houses and lilac bushes spilling in soft hues of purple and mauve over every fence. Harry books a room for himself at the _Nautic Hotel;_ it has white and blue flowered wallpaper, a white-painted desk, and a view of the sea. There is something calming about the air here, about the way the architecture is delicate and gorgeous, with white lattice-worked wooden balconies and pastel-painted facades; Harry feels almost at peace for the first time since Draco left him in an alpine inn, alone and heartbroken with an empty house that was always meant to be shared.

The first day, Harry walks along the port, breathing in the salty scent of sea air and letting the wind blow through his hair. The skies are grey and heavy with clouds, but Harry finds he doesn’t mind. He loves it here. It is too early in the season for tourists yet, but there are young children with their parents and loud seagulls fighting over fish, and everything feels so beautifully alive that Harry wants to commit it all to memory, hold it in his hands and cradle it to his heart. He’ll show Draco too someday, he thinks, when they’ll be so deliriously happy that this entire ordeal will be just an anecdote, a laugh and a kiss and _I’m so happy you’re here with me_ whispered into hair or soft skin. (The blade-glint hope cuts deep gashes into Harry’s skin at the thought.)

Instead of dwelling on it, Harry treads slowly through the meandering street and breathes in lungfuls of iodine and lilac. There is a blocky castle sitting atop a hill, and Harry strolls along its ancient bulwarks, staring at the sea in the distance. He realises he doesn’t have the first idea on how to find Draco, but it’s only noon yet, and how difficult can it be to find someone on an island, after all?

That evening, Harry has spent hours slowly meandering through picturesque streets and beautiful little shops, has gotten coffee and soaked by two separate rainstorms, and has spent several hours sitting on jagged rocks and staring at the sky while the splash-cold sea lapped at his feet and covered his skin in white-scrub salt. He’s seen people too: families and off-season tourists, shopkeepers and innkeepers and casual sailors stepping off white boats, but no one with starlight hair or quicksilver eyes. _Tomorrow,_ he tells himself. _Tomorrow, I’ll find him._

He does not find Draco the next day, though he explores the nature reserve that takes up most of the island, walking along lily-covered ponds lined with gnarled pine trees that shield his head from the soft rain and stepping over lichen-covered rock, among wind-swept trees and wild grasses. There is a cave, too, he finds, at the end of a past that twists through tall bushes of Queen Anne’s lace. The whole population of the island hid here once, a sign informs him, and there is a story in the ancient stones: a siege, and a priest, and the birth of a son, legend blurring with truth in every word. He stands in the soft darkness for a while and listens to the echoes of water falling somewhere, treasuring this liminal space he’s carved for himself here, between the not-knowing-yet and the anticipation of what will come next.

Still, that night, when he comes back to the inn, mud-covered and wet, disappointment is sharp as a needle in his chest. He thought he would have found Draco by now. He thought he would have an answer.

“Haft en bra dag, eller?” the man at the welcome desk asks in a booming voice as Harry walks past him to go out for dinner that night. “Himla synd att det har regnat så mycket på sista tiden, vädret brukar vara mycket bättre så här års. Men jag hoppas att du har haft några sköna dagar i alla fall?”

Despite Harry’s translation spell, he can’t quite make out what the man is telling him. Asking if something was nice, perhaps? Or was it the word for green? He smiles politely, fully intending to make his way to the door without getting dragged into a conversation he only understands a fraction of, before he realises this man might know about Draco. Draco’s mother said he came here regularly, after all, and surely people would notice those things on such a small island? _It’s not like I’ve got a better plan,_ he thinks and smiles at the man.

There are many questions sitting on Harry’s tongue, all of them about Draco. ( _Do you know of him?_ And: _Where can I find him?_ And: _Will he still love me here? Oh, please, tell me, will he love me still?_ )

“Älgen äter min halsduk,” Harry’s translation spell says.

A look of utter confusion creeps onto the man’s face.

“Mina föräldrar tycker inte om att du äter myror,” he tries again.

This time, laugher crinkles the man’s eyes.

“Din översättningsformel måste vara den värsta jag har sett, under alla år som jag har jobbat här,” he says as he casually takes a wand out from under the counter. 

“Det verkar vara något fel på din magiska kvintessens. Jag hade kollat upp det om jag var du, men tills dess så kan jag kasta en översättningsformel åt dig om du vill?” he adds, lazily waving and whispering a spell under his breath. 

Before Harry can react, magic washes over him, acrid and earthy like pine needles and fire-smoke. When the man speaks again, Harry understands every word. When Harry asks about Draco, perfect Swedish flows from his mouth.

Harry learns that Draco does indeed come to the island regularly and usually rents a little holiday cottage. He doesn’t come into the town much, but there is a lighthouse on the far side of the island, where everything is flat rocks and seawater as far as the eye can see. He might be there, the man tells Harry. And: go find him.

That night, when Harry slips underneath the crisp cotton covers, he thinks the man might have been a powerful legilimens too, from the way he smiled and winked and always seemed to know exactly what Harry wanted to say.

* * *

Try as he might, Harry cannot find sleep.

He tosses and he turns for several hours before he gives up and gets up and gets dressed. Then, he sits at the desk. Stands up. Paces around the room. Runs his hand through his hair. Sits again. There is a hole in the middle of his chest, shaped like Draco, and the anticipation is turning his blood into ants (running in his veins and burrowing chambers into his lungs.) He decides he might as well walk to the lighthouse

When Harry steps into the deserted streets of the town, the sky is still dark and stretching the bright jewels of its stars above him. He walks: past the port and across the beach and on the small earth paths amidst the Queen Anne’s lace and the maritime oak. There is a dash-dash-dash glow of the lighthouse in the distance, guiding ships safely to port. Harry lets it guide its footsteps too. (I _have been at sea for longer than I can remember, I have weathered storms and tasted saltwater on my tongue. I have been cold, and I have been lonely, and I have been lost. Bring me home safely too, like the men on those ships. Like them, let me come back to the one I love._ )

By the time Harry reaches the lighthouse, dawn has begun setting fire to the sky in earnest. Warm orange light is pooling in the crevices between the rocks and glittering softly on the crest of every wave. Harry could stay here his entire life, he thinks, stare out at the sea and the light kissing the water softly; he could calcify or solidify or turn to stone entirely. (He could be a part of this scenery, accepted and still, and not a boy standing on the verge of rejection like on the edge of a cliff, ready to jump and afraid of the fall.)

There is someone standing at the edge of the sea, and the sight of it fills Harry with lightning, crackling and violent and bright.

He walks towards the figure, slow and deliberate. (A circus acrobat, on a tightrope.) In his lungs, anticipation and brine swirl like smoke. (Don’t fall. Don’t fall. Don’t fall.)

Soft wind blows through Harry’s hair, and waves crash all around him, and still, he walks. His face is wet and salt seeps into his mouth as the sea spray kisses his skin (as tears escape from the dam that has been building across his throat ever since he set foot on the island, earlier still, since he took a portkey to Romania, perhaps. Ever since he ran and never looked back.)

So Harry walks, and all the while, the lighthouse lamp goes round. And round. And round. And Harry lets it guide his steps. ( _Cut through the dark for me, show me light and show me hope and show me the way. Bring me home and let me be safe and let me be loved. Oh, let me be loved again._ )

The man doesn’t turn around, but he’s got starlight hair and he’s wearing a fuzz-soft jumper despite the biting cold of early morning, and Harry would know him everywhere. (Draco. Draco. Draco.)

He could run, Harry could. He could still run, now. He could avoid rejection, avoid confrontation. He could go home to his hotel, to his empty house at the foot of the alps. He could never go home at all, could take a Portkey again, move to the desert and the forest and the arctic ocean and try to lose himself entirely there, try to forget his name and his face and spend an entire life trying not to be alive at all. It wouldn’t be good, but it would be safe, oh it would be safe and it would be familiar, and—Harry would be lying if he said he wasn’t thinking about it at all, because the vulnerability is cracking his chest open like a crayfish, and it is unbearable, it is—

Draco turns around, and the world stops.

There is every emotion on his beautiful face, like time-lapse clouds in front of the sun sweeping patches of shade across the ground.

“Harry,” he says in a strangled voice, and the sound of it fills Harry’s lungs with dry straw and cotton wool.

“I came for you,” Harry replies, still and breathless. (Teetering on the edge of a cliff, arms extended and eyes closed, a second away from the void.)

Around them: smooth flat stone, and small patches of sea-grass, and the endless crashing of wave after wave after wave. (In the lighthouse, the lantern burns in dotted lines across the minutes.)

“It… Harry… We can’t….” There is no violence in Draco’s words, no conviction (only the utter terror of a man standing on the edge of a different cliff.)

(There is freedom in the fall: Harry jumps.)

“Draco. Draco, listen,” he says softly, the words unhurried and unstoppable like water gushing from an alpine spring, like the endless motion of the waves, “I know you said we couldn’t work out, and I know I said I’d respect that, and—I’m sorry, Draco. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you how much I wanted you to stay. Let me do it now, Draco. Let me fight for you.”

Draco lets out a strangled sound and presses his fingers to his lips. There is unspeakable pain in his face. (An unbearable brightness too, sharp and scorching like love or hope.)

“I didn’t fight for you when we first broke up,” Harry continues as he slowly closes the gap between them, “and I didn’t fight for you in that hotel room either. I was so sick of fighting after the war, it was all I’d done my entire life, and though everyone kept telling me I’d won, I felt like I’d lost everything that mattered in the process. I was so sick of fighting, and I thought I could get away with not doing it ever again in my entire life. That was why I kept going to these galas, that was why the word _no_ never fell from my lips—but I lost you in the process and when I lost you, Draco? When I lost you, the entire world went grey and I lived every day like I’d been wrapped in gauze or smothered in fog. When I lost you, I became a ghost or an empty shell, and life isn’t worth living like this. Life isn’t worth living without you.”

Harry raises his hand and cups Draco’s cheek. Draco’s still and soft under his fingers, shoulders trembling and hands clenched tight together. (The phantom-memory of their pain is heavy and throbbing in the air between them.)

“You’re everything, Draco. You’re everything, and you’re worth fighting for, and I’m so sorry it’s taken me so long to realise. I know you’re always going to be the same person, Draco. And I’m always going to love that person, whether you’re by my side or not. And yes, we might make each other miserable sometimes. Yes, we will fight and we will cry and we will want to quit, because that’s what love is. And when we do, Draco? When we do, we will fight for each other. We will fight for our relationship. We’ll talk it through, and we’ll listen, and we’ll put in the work. And it will be beautiful, Draco. You and me. It will be beautiful despite our traumas and our hangups and the cracks on our souls. I promise you, Draco, it will be beautiful because we will make it so.”

They are standing on a rock surrounded by sea and the hesitant sunlight of dawn, and when the saltwater of their tears falls to the ground, it is embraced by the vastness of the waves like long lost daughters coming home. ( _We are home too. This is home, oh, this is home. Our two bodies, touching. This is home._ )

“There will be difficult days, because neither you nor I are the kind of people who get to live happily ever after. We are always going to be the kind of people with cracks in their souls and bruises on their sense of self and there will be days when we’ll get swallowed by the dark until we can’t find a way out. But I want to hold your hand in the darkness until you find the light again, Draco. I will sit with you until you’re able to see again, if you’ll let me. And if you can love me for all that I am, for every scar the war left on my skin and every hole it left in my heart, I’ll give you everything else too. I’ll give you the infinite love that lives in my chest, and I’ll give you the early morning smiles, and the soft evening words, and everything in between too. I’ll give you everything, if you’ll have me, Draco.”

Draco’s face fissures entirely at the words (an avalanche: cold and bright and deadly.)

“Yes,” he sobs. “I’ll have you. Oh, Harry, I’ll have you. Oh, you’re everything I’ve ever wanted.”

When their bodies crash together, it is beautiful and inexorable, like waves against rocks; they kiss like they’re drowning, violent and desperate, with grabbing hands and halting breaths.

“I love you,” Draco pants against Harry’s mouth. “I’ve always loved you. I’ve never stopped. I wouldn’t know where to start if I tried.”

“Draco,” Harry whispers back because the words have all left his chest, and everything that’s left is the feeling of home and the tangible form of the man he loves between his arms.

“I can’t believe you came for me,” Draco continues, “you complete madman. Oh, you reckless idiot. Oh, you came for me. You came for me. Oh, I love you, I love you, I love you.” (Harry lets the words drip all over his skin, warm and sweet like honey.)

When they tumble down on the rocks, when they pull at each other’s clothes and Harry’s back rests flush against the cool rocks as Draco touches him with hands careful and reverent as a saint holding a rosary, there is a light so bright in Harry’s chest that he thinks he might catch fire with it. (That he might burn and burn and burn until there’s nothing left of him but ash on a rock by the sea.) But he is not a pyre, and he does not consume, so instead he loves, and loves, and loves. Instead, he holds and he touches and he is touched until moans of ecstasy echo the faraway cry of seagulls.

And all the while, the rhythmic glow of the lighthouse washes over them like the verses of a rhyme long forgotten. ( _Home. Home. home._ )

* * *

The _Rosaire_ officially opens as a structure for troubled youth less than three months after that.

It isn’t a big thing, the opening ceremony, but state officials do come and give a speech or two. The entire building is gleaming in the bright August sunlight, and every room smells faintly of wax and floor polish. Every ghost is in attendance, dressed in their finest clothes and chatting excitedly among themselves. Sœur Félicie glows with pride at the newly painted walls and the freshly replaced window panes. The officials cannot hear her speak, of course, but that does not stop her from informing them that this place deserves to be loved and taken care of again. 

There are a few teens too, those whose home life was dire enough that Harry was compelled to ask them to come and help with the renovation. “As a favour,” he said, remembering that kindness is sometimes barb-covered and cutting when you've known nothing but indifference or violence your entire life. They’re good kids, the lot of them. Each of them hurts in their own way, with the spiderweb cracks of abuse and loneliness visible on their souls, but they’re full of life and laughter, and they’ve all started to heal.

By the time the officials take a polite leave, Mrs Brodard is learning a TikTok dance in the piano room under the careful tutelage of a pair of Muggle-born siblings and Agnès is animatedly discussing a makeup tutorial with a young squib boy in a flowery dress and bright blue Doc Martens. Draco is standing in front of the French door and staring out onto the park, bushes and brambles long gone and replaced by a lush lawn that stretches past the tall shade of the Lebanon cedars and out onto green pastures. Harry reaches for his waist. It’s a familiar gesture by now: they’ve learned to find comfort in all the quiet touches of everyday life. Draco turns and smiles, pride and happiness and love glowing on his face all at once.

“We did it,” he whispers into Harry’s neck as Harry embraces him.

“I’m glad you’re here too, Draco. I’m glad we’re doing this together,” Harry replies, and it’s every bit as beautiful as he promised Draco it would be, once, on a rock by the sea. It’s every bit as warm with affection and blinding bright with happiness, and there are still days when Harry thinks he might burst with the intensity of the love that lives in his chest.

“Good work, boys,” comes a cheerful voice from behind them.

Iris is smiling as she floats towards them, her arm around the waist of a pretty girl with bright lipstick, several piercings and outrageously pink coloured hair.

“I’m glad you came back. I’m glad you made good on your promises to fix the place. You really had me worried, you know? What were you thinking, leaving this idiot to mope all alone in the chapel? How on earth did you ever think he was going to do anything useful on his own?” she adds, jutting her head towards Harry.

Before Harry can protest, the girl with the pink hair kisses her cheek.

“Let them be, Iris. It isn’t always easy, figuring things out. We should know!”

“I’m a ghost, Sara,” Iris replies, a playful pout on her lips. “It took some creative thinking, making things work between us! What is their excuse? They were both tangible from the start!”

At the words, Sara picks Iris up by the waist and twirls her around as peals of laughter echo through the room.

“Go be disgustingly cute somewhere else, girls,” someone yells from the other side of the room. Iris promptly gives them the fingers; the space fills with jeers and laughter.

And in the warm light of afternoon, surrounded by happiness and friendly faces, with his hand in Draco’s, Harry finally thinks he knows what it’s like to be home.

**Author's Note:**

> **General notes:**
> 
> The _Rosaire_ is a real place. It was built in the _préalpes fribourgeoises_ in the 1930s to house tuberculosis patients. After the sanatorium closed, it was turned into a summer camp. In the late 2000s, the camp was closed because it couldn't comply with modern safety regulations and the building sat empty for more than 10 years. The rave party is sadly inspired by reality as well. That happened in 2018 and it made the papers here.
> 
> In the real world, it is now no longer for sale. It has been bought and is in the process of being turned into a hotel and a museum.
> 
> I took some liberties in my description of both the inside of the building and the grounds, but if you'd like to see how the real thing looks, you'll find pictures [here](https://www.laliberte.ch/photos/galeries-de-l-annee-2016/le-rosaire-cherche-ach0eteur-desesperement-370158). Iris is based both on 1930s fashion plates and on [this picture](https://api.memobase.ch/memobase-core-application/documents/Museegruerien-G-10-15-0182-03/content/G-10-15-0182-03.jpg) of _Rosaire_ patients relaxing in the woods.
> 
> Marstrand is also a real place, though I've never actually been there. All my knowledge is based on [this website](https://www.marstrand.se/en/), google maps and Andithiel's holiday pictures. It is gorgeous and I hope that I can go there one day.
> 
> * * *
> 
> **Translation notes:**
> 
> All the original dialogue has been written in such a way as to convey an accent or a specific dialect. Both french-speaking characters have a Swiss accent, Mrs Brodard's being a bit thicker than the man in wellies'. In Sweden, the hotel clerk's speech has traces of a mild Gothenburg dialect. This didn't translate too well into English, so the translation is a lot more neutral than the original language.
> 
> In the scene where Harry offers to buy the building:
> 
> "It's not that we don't want to sell it," a man in green wellies told Harry, leaning against his tractor, “but we need guarantees, you see? The boat is part of our local history. We don't want to see it altered beyond recognition."  
>  [...]  
>  “I many money. Be careful. Very love,” Harry’s disastrous translation spells said.
> 
> In the scene where Harry tells the ghosts what he intends to do with the building:
> 
> “You're a good man,” Mrs Brodard tells Harry in the reverent silence of the room. "It's a good thing you're doing here. A good thing indeed. If my Henri had had a place like this one...”   
>  [...]  
>  “You have my benediction,” Mrs Brodard continues, her voice rough but firm.  
>  “And you have mine,” says an old woman wearing what appears to be a nightdress and slippers.  
>  “And mine,” a woman in a stiff woollen suit adds.
> 
> In the scene where Harry talks to the man at the hotel welcome desk:
> 
> “Did you have a good day?” the man at the welcome desk asks in a booming voice as Harry walks past him to go out for dinner that night. “It’s a shame it’s been raining so much lately, really, the weather is usually much better this time of year. But I hope you had some a good time anyway?"  
>  [...]  
>  “The moose is eating my scarf,” Harry’s translation spell says.  
>  A look of utter confusion creeps onto the man’s face.  
>  “My parents don't like that you eat ants,” he tries again.  
>  This time, laugher crinkles the man’s eyes.  
>  “Your translation spell is one of the worst I’ve ever seen in the many years I’ve worked here,” he says as he casually takes a wand out from under the counter.   
>  “I’d get my magical core checked if I were you, but for now, I'll cast another one for you, if you want?” he adds, lazily waving and whispering a spell under his breath. 
> 
> * * *
> 
> I live @etalice on tumblr. Come say hi!


End file.
